On our last evening. Philip takes me to an Italian restaurant he likes in the far West Forties, way outside any fashionable or literary neighbourhoods. (‘You won’t see Joan Didion here,’ he says.) It’s a family business, full of big, tough, snazzily dressed Italian couples, quiet family groups and the chef’s relations. Philip is greeted as an old friend. Work’s over, and he settles down to have fun: anecdotes, character-sketches, jokes, songs, impersonations, come pouring out. It’s not like being at Versailles with the Sun King any more. It’s like having supper with the Marx Brothers; it’s like tuning into your very own radio channel, the Roth Station. The volume goes up as the comedy gets more outrageous, and heads turn – not in recognition, here, but because people nearby are being distracted from their own conversations. One old man, out for a quiet evening with his wife, says wrily to Roth as they leave, passing our table: ‘Try and enjoy yourself.’

Savvy readers will notice a slight change in this week’s heading. Today we’re shaking up Webcomics Wednesdays by featuring an initiative that will eventually be on the web (and elsewhere). Comics Uniting Nations, a partnership between Reading with Pictures, Project Everyone, and PCI Media (an organization dedicated to producing “entertainment-education”) plans to use the “universal visual […]

Cindy: I know a stack of librarians who will love An Ambush of Tigers: A Wild Gathering of Collective Nouns (2015), by Betsy R. Rosenthal. We’ve read a few collective noun books before and Lynn and I are fans of them all. There’s something about the tidy organizing that must appeal to the librarians in […]

Cindy: Please wash your hands before you read this post! Measles, whooping cough, and now an outbreak of typhus … in youth literature, that is! A few years ago, Lynn and I posted about a fictional Typhoid Mary story, Deadly (2011) by Julie Chibbaro, and I was intrigued about Mary Mallon and her real story. This year […]

Savvy readers will notice a slight change in this week’s heading. Today we’re shaking up Webcomics Wednesdays by featuring an initiative that will eventually be on the web (and elsewhere). Comics Uniting Nations, a partnership between Reading with Pictures, Project Everyone, and PCI Media (an organization dedicated to producing “entertainment-education”) plans to use the “universal visual […]

Cindy: I know a stack of librarians who will love An Ambush of Tigers: A Wild Gathering of Collective Nouns (2015), by Betsy R. Rosenthal. We’ve read a few collective noun books before and Lynn and I are fans of them all. There’s something about the tidy organizing that must appeal to the librarians in […]

Cindy: Please wash your hands before you read this post! Measles, whooping cough, and now an outbreak of typhus … in youth literature, that is! A few years ago, Lynn and I posted about a fictional Typhoid Mary story, Deadly (2011) by Julie Chibbaro, and I was intrigued about Mary Mallon and her real story. This year […]